Natural Language Processing and Social Dynamics lab (NASLAB): The research in the lab is focused on the computational processing of language with special focus on the way language is used in different social contexts and the ways meaning changes and evolves over time and space. We develop and use state of the art computational methods in order to learn how language brings people together and how it may drive them apart. While algorithmic at its core, this challenging endeavor is multidisciplinary in nature, involving computer science, linguistics, political science and sociology. Indeed we collaborate with scholars of all these fields.
If you are interested in this line of research and want to join the lab please drop for a visit or drop us a line.
Location: building 96, room 105.
Latest News
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New Paper (Accepted, EMNLP, 2022): How to Do Things without Words: Modeling Semantic Drift of Emoji (with Eyal Arviv). (preprint)
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Establishing a new Research Center: The university approved the establishment of the Interdisciplinary Research Center for Digital Politics and Strategy (status: מרכז בהקמה): DPS@BGU
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Talk (July 8, 2022): Modeling Decentralized Group Coordination at Large Scale, Computational Data Science Seminar, School of Information, University of Michigan
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New Paper (Expert Systems with Application [ESWA], 2022): Unsupervised Discovery of Non-Trivial Similarities between Online Communities (with Abraham Israeli and Shani Cohen).
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New Paper (NAACL-WOAH, 2022): Free speech or Free Hate Speech? Analyzing the Proliferation of Hate Speech in Parler (with Abraham Israeli).
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Talk (May 29, 2022): Modeling Decentralized Group Coordination at Large Scale, Computational Data Science Seminar, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.
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New Paper (WWW 2022): This Must Be the Place: Predicting Engagement of Online Communities in a Large-scale Distributed Campaign (with Abraham Israeli and Alexander Kremiansky).
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New Paper (AAAI 2022): STEM: Unsupervised STructural EMbedding for Stance Detection (with Ron Korenblum Pick, Vladyslav Kozhukhov, and Dan Vilenchik)
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Defended their thesis: Gal Nezer, Aviv Ben-Haim, Eyal Arviv, Simo Hanouna
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New Paper (EACL 2021): Open-Mindedness and Style Coordination in Argumentative Discussions (with Aviv Ben-Haim)
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New Paper (EACL 2021): With Measured Words: Simple Sentence Selection for Black-Box Optimization of Sentence Compression Algorithms (with Yotam Shichel and Meir Kalech)
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Congratulations to Avrahami Israeli for winning the President Fellowship for Excellence in Research for 2021-2023
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New Paper (ICWSM 2021): It’s a Thin Line Between Love and Hate: Using the Echo in Modeling Dynamics of Racist Online Communities (with Eyal Arviv and Simo Hanouna)
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New Paper (ICWSM 2021): Discourse Parsing for Contentious, Non-Convergent Online Discussions (with Stepan Zakharov, Omri Hadar, Tovit Hakak, Dina Grossman and Yifat Ben-David Kolikant)
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New Paper (2021): Pkg2Vec: Hierarchical package embedding for code authorship attribution (with Roni Mateless and Robert Moskovitch), Future Generation Computer Systems


Projects
2019 Israeli Election
Contextual Discourse Parsing
Modeling Large Scale Distributed Campaigns
Influence in Networks (especially in the political context)
The Tide: racist and abusive trends in online communities
Digital Forensics (and the applicability of machine learning based evidence in evidence law)